WHITWORTH SPY TRIAL TO OPEN

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000504210012-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 24, 2012
• Sequence Number: 12
• Publication Date: March 3, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/01/24: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504210012-0
Whitworth Spy Trial to Open
Defendant Last of Four in Walker Ring
By Ruth Marcus
Washington Post Std( Writer
SAN FRANCISCO-The trial of
5
retired Navy communications ex-
pert Jerry Alfred Whitworth is to
start in federal court here this week
in a case that should provide the
fullest public picture yet of the dam-
age allegedly caused by the Walker
spy ring and an unprecedented
glimpse into the arcane, superse-
cret world of military communica-
tions and codes.
Whitworth. 46 the last of four
Navy men charged in the Walker-
espionage ring, to appear in court, is
charged with 13 counts of espio-
nage, conspiracy and federal in-
come tax violations.
The government alleges that,
from 1974 until John Anthony
Walker Jr.'s arrest May 20, 1985,
Whitworth conspired with Walker
to pass classified defense docu-
ments and information. He received
more than $332,000, according to
the government.
A senior chief radioman when he
retired from the Navy in 1983 after
a 21-year career, Whitworth "re-
ceived training in virtually all as-
pects of Navy communications and
served both at sea and at Navy
bases ashore in positions that per-
mitted him access to a broad soec-
trum of sensitive military commu-
nications," according to a federal
indictment.
The most sensitive of the infor-
mation allegedly funneled to the
Soviets was "cryptographic keylists
and key cards," the daily-changing
codes that are used to encrypt and
read classified messages, along with
technical manuals and design plans
for the coding machines them-
selves. With the logic diagrams"
contained in the manuals, prosecu-
tors said in court papers filed last
month, "a sophisticated adversary
having modem computer capabil-
ities" would have been able "to re-
create the encryption machine."
Armed with both pieces of the
cryptographic puzzle, sources famil-
iar with the technology said, the
Soviets would have been able to
listen freely to some sensitive Navy
communications. The Whitworth
trial is expected to disclose what
channels of communications may
have been compromised and how
sensitive they were. . .
The star witness at Whitworth's
trial, which is expected to last eight
to 10 weeks, will be his Navy col-
league and close friend Walker, 48,
a retired Navy chief warrant officer
and Norfolk private detective.
Walker masterminded the espi-
onage ring that ipcluded his broth-
er, retired Navy Lt. Cmdr. Arthur
James Walker, 51, and John Walk-
er's son, Navy Seaman Michael
Lance Walker, 23. John Walker's
agreement to testify against Whit-
worth provided a crucial link in the
prosecution's case, which until then
was largely circumstantial.
John Walker pleaded guilty in
federal court in Baltimore Oct. 28
to conspiring to commit espionage
with the two other Walkers and
Whitworth. Under the plea agree-
ment, he is to be sentenced to life in
prison. He promised to testify
against Whitworth in return for a
reduced sentence for his son, who
also pleaded guilty and will be sen-
tenced to 25 years.
Arthur Walker was convicted
Aug. 9 of giving John Walker two
reports marked "confidential," the
lowest category of classified infor-
mation, from VSE Corp., a Ches-
apeake, Va., firm where Arthur
Walker worked as an engineer.
If U.S. District Judge John P. Vu-
kasin Jr. permits it. Arthur Walker
and Michael Walker are also ex-
pected to be called on by prosecu-
tors to corroborate Jbhn Walker's
story-marking the first time ei-
ther will have detailed publicly his
espionage activities. According to
court documents, John Walker
urged his brother to "operate like
Jerry, who was making big bucks"
photographing classified documents
for John Walker.
John Walker's ex-wife, Barbara
Joy Crowley Walker, and his daugh-
ter, Laura Walker Snyder, whom
John Walker tried to recruit to spy
when she was an Army communi-
cations specialist, are also on the
government's list of potential wit-
nesses, as is Pamela K. Carroll, a
former girlfriend of John Walker.
In addition to the first public
statements by Walker about the
origins and operation of the spy
ring, the trial will feature testimony
by Earl Clark, the former deputy
chief of communications security at
the National Security Agency, who
is to discuss the importance of se-
cure military communications and
explain to the jurors how the coding
machines and cards work. Clark is
expected to bring one of the coding
machines into court to demonstrate
its operation.
The overnment's witness list
inclu
director of the National Security
Agency an former deputy director
o the IA; Vice Adm. Robert E.
Kit sey. a director of the Navy
division that handles cryptography
and communications; Rear Adm.
Lawrence Layman, head of naval
communications, and Gerald Rich-
ard, an FBI expert in Soviet spy
methods, or "tradecraft "
On June .12, nine days after Whit-
worth's arrest and at the height of
public attention to the Walker case,
Chief of Naval Operations Adm.
James D. Watkins provided the first
official assessment of the potential
damage done by the ring. He said
that the loss appeared to be "very
serious" but "not catastrophic," and
that the biggest damage was in the
area of communications.
Whitworth's trial will offer the
first public damage assessment since
then-other than testimony at Ar-
thur Walker's trial, which was lim-
ited to the two reports he passed to
the Soviets-and the first since
Walker agreed to provide details
about the operations of the spy net-
work.
The defense case will focus pri-
marily on attacking Walker, accord-
ing to defense lawyer James Lar-
son. "We think the central issue in
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the case really is the credibility of
John Walker,* Larson said. He said
the defense will attempt to under-
mine Walker's story by "going into
what he says very thoroughly and
very carefully."
Larson said he planned to call
some defense witnesses, unlike law-
yers for Arthur Walker, who rested
their case without presenting a de-
fense. But, Larson said, "A lot of
our defense will consist of cross-ex-
amination of their witnesses, not
necessarily presenting alternative"
witnesses:
One potential defense witness is
Whitworth himself., In papers filed
Feb. 7, defense lawyers argued that
the case against Whitworth should
be split in two, with the espionage
charges tried separately from the
tax counts. Although they did not
explain why, defense lawyers Lar-
son and Tony Tamburello said
Whitworth "wishes to testify con-
cerning the espionage charges but
not the tax and fraud allegations."
The motion to sever the charges is
pending.
Vukasin is to hear arguments
today on a renewed bid by Assistant
U.S. Attorneys William Farmer Jr.
and Leida B. Schoggen to introduce
a series of letters to the FBI from
"RUS" offering to expose a "signif-
icant espionage system." Prosecu-
tors contend that Whitworth wrote
the letters, but Vukasin has ruled
against their introduction.
Jury selection, which is expected
to begin tomorrow, is expected to
consume a week because of the
publicity the Walker cases have
generated.
Whitworth was sitting at the per-
sonal computer in his Davis, Calif.,
mobile home on the morning of May
20, 1985, writing a letter to John
Walker, when two FBI agents rang
the doorbell.
Walker, they informed him, had
been arrested and charged with es-
pionage. "I was dumbfounded and
didn't respond immediately," Whit-
worth wrote in an affidavit .... "I
don't exactly recall my response,
but I think it was something like, 'I
don't know what to think.' "
Hours earlier, FBI agents had
arrested Walker in a hallway of the
Rockville Ramada Inn. Agents trail-
ing Walker had seen him near a se-
cluded site in Poolesville, in west-
ern Montgomery County, where
they later found a bag disguised as
trash and filled with classified doc-
uments from the aircraft carrier
USS Nimitz, where Michael Walker
was working as a clerk in the ship's
operation's department.
Also contained in the bag were
two "Dear Friend" letters from
Walker to his, Soviet handler. "'D'
continues to be a puzzle," Walker
wrote. "He is not happy, but is still
not ready to continue our 'cooper-
ation' .... My guess ... he is go-
ing to flop in the stockbroker field
and can probably make a modest
living in computer sales." Walker
included two "Dear Johnny" letters
from "D" himself, which discussed,
among ether things, "news about
Brenda's job prospects."
Whitworth's wife is Brenda Reis;
Whitworth, who had retired from .
the Navy in October 1983, was
studying to be a stockbroker, hav-
ing decided to abandon the idea of
computer sales,
FBI agents had already been
alerted to Whitworth's possible in
volvement by two "confidential in-
formants" later identified as Barba-
ra Walker and Laura Walker Sny-
der, who told them of West Coast
man named "Jerry Wentworth" who
was allegedly part of the spy ring.
In a search of Walker's Norfolk
house, agents found-among other
things-papers that identified "D"
as "Jer," and handwritten notes that
dealt with secure Navy communi-
cations systems and that contained
one of Whitworth's fingerprints,
according to court papers.
Two weeks after they first
knocked on his door, the FBI issued
an arrest warrant for Whitworth,
who turned himself in at the FBI's
San Francisco office.
As portrayed in the indictment,
the espionage conspiracy between
Whitworth and Walker started in
1974 at a meeting in Boom Tren-
chard's Flare Path restaurant and
bar in San Diego.
The Navy colleagues had met a
few years earlier when Whitworth
was a communications instructor at
the Service School Command in San
Diego and Walker was assistant di-
rector of the Radioman "A" school
there. Walker had been spying for
the Soviets since 1968, but by
1974-two years before his retire-
ment from the Navy-he had appar-
ently decided to expand his opera-
tions.
At Boom Trenchard's, the indict-
ment alleges, the two men "formed
an espionage partnership whereby
Walker would eventually be respon-
sible for the transportation and sale
of classified information and Whit-
JERRY ALFRED WHITWORTH
... espionage trial begins this week
worth would be responsible for ob-
taining such information, the profits
from the enterprise to be split
equally between them."
The indictment details a series of
more than 20 meetings, in Califor-
nia, Norfolk, Hong Kong and the
Philippines, at which Whitworth
allegedly passed classified informa.
tion to Walker. The meetings were
often followed shortly by meetings
betwen Walker and his Soviet con-
tact, according to the indictment.
In addition to the charge that he
conspired with Walker to commit
espionage. Whitworth faces eight
counts of espionage for allegedly
passing Walker classified information
from the aircraft carrier USS Con-
stellation, the USS Niagara Falls, 'the
Naval Telecommunications Center at
Alameda, Calif., and the nuclear air-
craft carrier USS Enterprise. At
those postings Whitworth held in-
creasingly responsible jobs in com-
munications, with access to intelli-
gence messages and coding material.
Whitworth, a balding, bearded,
studious-looking man who has been
held without bond since his arrest,
grew up on a 600-acre wheat and
soybean farm in Muldrow, Okla.,
near the Arkansas border. He was
voted "class clown" at Muldrow High
and left home at age 17. He joined
the Navy in 1962, and he specialized
in communications in a career that
took him across the globe.
Whitworth's uncle, Willard
Owens, said Whitworth "sounds
great" despite nine months in jail
and remains optimistic about his
chances for acquittal. "He believes
that he's going to come free of the
thing," Owens said.
A
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His twice-weekly conversations
with Whitworth, he said, touch on
the monotony of the jail food and the
newspapers and magazines Whit-
worth has been reading but they
mostly focus on life in Muldrow.
"We talk about things here at
home mostly," he said, "about the
farm and the way it used to be and
the way it will be when he comes
out."
Prosecutor: `The Best Job a Lawyer Can Have'
William S. Farmer Jr., the chief prosecutor in the
Whitworth case, believes that being a federal prosecu-
tor "is the best job a lawyer can have."
A banker's son who grew up in the South but fell in
love with San Francisco "after having taken one cable
car ride," Farmer, who is known as "Buck," started in
the San Francisco office of the Justice Department's
antitrust division, working on oil mergers and timber
bid-rigging cases.
He switched to the U.S. attorney's office in 1979 in
order to get more trial experience, but he still likes to
handle complex cases. "The quick case, the routine stuff
is not so much a challenge because ... one person's
dope case is going to look like another person's dope
case," said Farmer, a graduate of Princeton University
and the University of Texas Law School.
Farmer, 44, who is being assisted at the trial by As-
sistant U.S. Attorney Leida B. Schoggen, worked on
the espionage case against James Harper, an electron-
ics engineer who helped his wife sell stolen documents
from a Palo Alto, Calif., defense contractor to Polish
intelligence agents. Harper pleaded guilty in 1984 and
was sentenced to life in prison.
But the most memorable of the cases handled by the
U.S. attorney's office during Farmer's six years there
was one that involved hint a bit too personally.
Farmer was sitting in his office one day in 1982, he
recalled, when "just on a whim" he chose to accept a
collect telephone call from an inmate at Lompoc Prison.
Farmer had successfully prosecuted a Colombian co-
caine dealer, Jose Robert Gomez-Soto, who was serving
time at Lompoc.
The inmate caller, Leon (Magic) Colburn, told Farm-
er that Gomez-Soto was plotting to assassinate Farmer,
the federal judge who had sentenced him, several wit-
nesses and federal agents.
"Magic" was supposed to be the hit man, and the FBI
arranged to have him cooperate, but there were some
nerve-racking days, Farmer recalled, "when I was wor-
ried to death that 'Magic' wouldn't be taken out of pris-
on and Gomez-Soto would go through some other line of
communication [to arrange the hit] and we wouldn't
know anything about it."
The plot was foiled, and Gomez-Soto and his son
were eventually convicted of conspiracy to murder, but
"it was a harrowing experience," Farmer said. "At the
time I didn't appreciate the fact that I was scared."
- Ruth Mamas
Larson Takes on `Most Challenging' Case
Jerry Whitworth's chief defense lawyer, James Lar-
son, is no stranger to defending underdogs.
A graduate of Stanford University and UCLA law
school, Larson said he was active in "the movement"
during the 1960s and ended up representing "draft re-
sisters, black liberation groups, prisoners and alleged
lefties."
The most celebrated was Wendy Yoshimura, a
Symbionese Liberation Army member captured with
heiress Patricia Hearst in San Francisco in 1975. Yo-
shimura was convicted of illegal possession of weapons
and explosives in connection with terrorist activity in
Berkeley, Calif., in the early 1970s.
"Philosophically and politically I am always concerned
with the abuse of power by the government, and I think
there are a lot of interesting intellectual and moral is-
sues involved in criminal law," Larson, 42, said in a re-
cent interview.
The Whitworth case is Larson's first espionage trial,
and "it's definitely the most challenging of all," he said.
"Particularly in this case, you've got the full weight and
power of the government coming down on an individual,
and the drama basically takes place on the front page of
the newspaper. It really calls upon every resource that
you've got to defend him."
Larson has been working full time on the Whitworth
case for about six months. His cocounsel is Tony Tam-
burello, who has simultaneously been preparing to han-
dle the retrial of Larry Layton, former People's Temple
member charged with conspiracy in the 1978 slaying of
a California Democratic congressman Leo J. Ryan at
Jonestown, Guyana.
Tamburello's fees are being paid by the government
because-although the federal death penalty for spying
has been invalidated-espionage under the law is still
technically a capital crime that entitles a defendant to a
second lawyer.
"I'm certainly looking forward to a resolution of the
case," Larson said. "I think it's going to be a very inter-
esting trial."
- Ruth Marcus
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